Matt keeps his backpack company in the lobby of his hostel waiting for the bus, gently rocking to the slow cadence of the oscillating air-con unit. He looks back to the elevator further inside, the one that leads to his now-former residence. It’s much too early for other travelers to be awake. The only reason he’s even up is to catch a bus. He’s going to Halong Bay today, a four hour drive east of Hanoi, Vietnam, the city he’s in, but this next step in his journey is bittersweet.
With this bus, he leaves his most recent backpacker group. Though he’s been traveling for weeks through Thailand and now Vietnam, this had been the first group of people that he’s had the opportunity to adventure with on a repeated and sustained basis. They’ve shared the same hostel dorm, waited out the mid-afternoon heat on the same balcony, and explored the largest fraction of the city’s culture that they could in their brief time together. It’s been awesome.
It will not, however, be the attractions they visited together that will stick in his memory, but the (sometimes terrifying, sometimes frustrating, always interesting) experiences that they’ve shared. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any of his time at all in the city that didn’t feature one or more of these crazy Brits.